A blog about reading, buying, and selling books

August 01, 2008

Amazon.com purchasing AbeBooks

Amazon.com is purchasing AbeBooks. As a long-time industry-watcher, I think this is pretty big news, certainly the most significant acquisition in the online used/rare book space to date—and yet not a lot may change.

When AbeBooks acquired BookFinder.com, there was some concern from well-wishers that they’d shut us down or make us skew our results—but neither happened, or was even an option. We’re still a small independently-managed operation, but now with more resources to draw upon.

It’s interesting seeing AbeBooks go through the same process as we did, but with Amazon.com. I know enough about the deal to be very confident that AbeBooks will follow a similar model: being run independently, but with the ability to draw on Amazon.com for help when they need it. And as for BookFinder.com? For better or for worse, the change doesn’t impact us at all. (Though personally, I wouldn’t mind if we got some free Audible subscriptions out of all this.)

Comments

Here is a slightly different take on the acquisition... Amazon is a monopoly which just got even more powerful. Abebooks was one of the few competitors for Amazon. Less competition can not be a good thing for readers, writers, or booksellers who used Abebooks to sell their books. This acquisition is only good for Amazon and it's shareholders. Everyone else will pay the price one way or the other. But that's the way of free markets!

What Rob said. I emailed Amazon at the time they bought bibliofind, and noted the excellence of of bibliofind's search format compared to the suckitude of theirs. I've already been concerned by the addition of megasellers and vapourvendors to ABE's database, so I really hope the cluelessness doesn't spread.

The natural insitinct is to look for value in tech stocks when you want to capitalize on the tech revolution, right? Wrong. The tech revolution has arguably created the most value in retail, notably the success of Wal-mart and the Walton family fortune.